President Obama Wins Iowa

President Obama pulled off a surprising victory in Iowa. I was under the impression that he was so unpopular as a president that he’d be challenged in the primary or that he would have dropped out by now due to pressures of the job. He didn’t though. Not yet anyway. Oh, and in other news there was a GOP caucus at the same time with some interesting results.

So Mitt Romney (24.6%) squeaked out a narrow 8 vote victory over a surprisingly strong Rick Santorum (24.5%) while Ron Paul came in at a near 3rd (21.4%).

As was no real surprise that Gingrich, Perry, Bachmann and Huntsman piled into the bottom teir teetering on the edge of irrelevancy. Gingrich probably stands a better chance than Santorum at this point considering the next few events but we'll just have to see. There's a sense that Perry will drop out soon and Bachmann and Huntsman should certainly do the same.

One of my favorite things about primaries is that you get more data. Exit polls and entrance polls provide glimpses into the mind of primary voters so you get a sense perhaps of why they voted a certain way or their overall mood.

The Iowa entrance polls aren't that useful or extensive but they do provide a few interesting nuggets.

Ron Paul appealed to his typical base. He won his support early in the year and gathered up the youth vote, the poorest voters, independents, those looking for a "true conservative," and those concerned about the budget deficit.

Santorum appealed to his typical base of evangelical voters. He won his support largely in the last few weeks and gathered up more women voters, middle aged folks, those earning a decent income, those in support of the TEA Party, and those concerned about abortion.

Romney continued to be the candiate people support for many reasons related simply to him being most likely to win. He gathered up the oldest voters, the richest voters, those concerned about the economy, folks looking for an experienced businessman, and voters who figured him most likely to beat Obama.

So now we wait to see how this outcome shifts New Hampshire and South Carolina and it will be fun watching the right spin their candidates in certain directions.

As a resident of SC I’m starting to get the usual bombardment of emails from this cast of characters. Santorum has been given access to the Town Hall email list, home of one of my favorite columns in Walter E. Williams. As a result he’s now hitting me up for $35. Sorry Rick…

Mitt has access to the Jenny Sanford email list and has been using it. Jenny’s puppets Mark and Nikki are stumping for him but I don’t think she has the political power of past masters (i.e. Carol Campbell) so we’ll see how well she can pull off the “Romney in SC” thing. There is still a lot of resistance to Mitt around here.

With Ron Paul it’s the messenger and not the message. I’ve never understood libertarian politicians. As someone who has many libertarian beliefs- I took one of those tests one time and it said I was a moderately conservative libertarian- the last thing I would ever do is run for any kind of public office. Paul on the other hand has been running since the 1970’s. In the end I’m sure he’ll score well with the younger set since they don’t mind hypocrisy as much.